Six Indian-Americans are among the 30 winners of the 2024 New Americans Contest, a merit-based graduate program for immigrants and children of immigrants.
Selected from 2,323 candidates, the 30 Pauls
The six Native American scholars in the 2024 class of distinguished New Americans are: Aayush Karan, Akshay Swaminathan, Keerthana Hogirala, Malavika Kannan, Shubhayu Bhattacharyay, and Ananya Agustin Malhotra.
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Since the fellowship’s inception 26 years ago, the program has more than $80 million in funding and recipients have studied a variety of fields, from medicine and the arts to law and business.
“As we welcome these impressive new fellows to our community, I am filled with pride and hope for the bright long-term future they will have professionally and the contribution they will bring to our country. Their stories demonstrate the strength and energy inherent in immigrant identity – they are afraid to take risks and think big,” said Daisy Soros, co-founder of the program.
“Congratulations to the new fellows.
In addition to receiving up to $90,000 in investment for the graduate program of your choice, Paul Scholars
The alumni network is U. S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, who is the first Indian-born surgeon general and helped lead the national response to Ebola, Zika and the coronavirus.
Applications for the 2025-26 school year are open and must be submitted by October 31, 2024.
READ: Native Americans Win Paul and Daisy Soros Scholarships (April 26, 2023)
Six of Amerindian origin:
Aayush Karan: Scholarship awarded for PhD work in quantum science and engineering at Harvard University
Aayush Karan was born to parents who immigrated from India to the United States to conduct research on cancer biology, moving around the country, largely in the Midwest, before eventually settling in Wisconsin.
From Indian folk bedtimes to fantasy novels to his own parents’ travels, stories were a central element in Aayush’s life, forcing him to follow many narrative paths, adding classical piano and artistic writing.
Her parents’ unconditional support in those activities, as well as her intense determination toward impactful studies, fostered a voluntary preference for identifying meaningful relevance to broader communities, which strongly guided Aayush’s pastime for clinical studies.
Aayush first fell in love with natural mathematics in high school and published studies on low-dimensional topology for which he was named a Regeneron Science Talent Search finalist and Davidson Fellow.
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As a student at Harvard, he then focused on computer science, physics, and mathematics at one of the best economics schools, graduating summa laude in 2023. Aayush was elected Junior Marshal 24 to the Harvard Phi Beta Kappa Chapter and received the Sophia Freund Award. for Academic Performance.
He also awarded a Barry Goldwater Fellowship in 2022 for his undergraduate studies, expanding his mathematical education to highly applicable clinical applications, adding the design of aliasing algorithms for RNA sequences, factual correctors for giant language models, and compilers for optimization disorders in short-term quantum devices. . .
Aayush is now continuing his learning of classical and quantum computing as a PhD student in Harvard’s Quantum Engineering and Sciences program. In the long term, he hopes to actively participate in advancing the frontiers of synthetic intelligence systems and ensure that his prospects for large-scale transformation are learned safely and efficiently.
Ananya Agustin Malhotra: Scholarship awarded to a J. D. at Yale
Born and raised in Georgia, Ananya Agustin Malhotra is the daughter of immigrants from Obando, Bulacan, Philippines, and New Delhi, India. Raised in a bicultural and interfaith household, Ananya is deeply motivated through the history of her parents’ family circle to advocate for a more just and nonviolent long-term American foreign policy.
Ananya’s interests lie at the intersection of global history, foreign law, and peace and security issues. He graduated summa laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Princeton University with a concentration in the School of Public and International Affairs.
His college dissertation, based on oral histories of the New Mexico Downwinders, explored the human legacy of 1945’s Trinity control and the American nuclear age. At Princeton, Ananya served as chair of the SHARE (Sexual Harassment/Assault Counseling, Resources and Education) peer program, where she first brought survivor-centered advocacy.
As a Rhodes Fellow at the University of Oxford, Ananya graduated with a master’s degree in Modern European History, the History of Empire and Anti-Colonialism in the Shaping of the Foreign Order.
Her dissertation has explored the role of epistemology in the global intellectual history of decolonization and has been published in Global Histories and the Journal of the History of Ideas blog.
For more than four years, Ananya has advocated for nuclear disarmament and harm alleviation through her research, studies, and public comments. Ananya has worked in Washington, D. C. , at the Nuclear Threat Initiative and the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft to advance policies to foster a safer, less violent world.
Ananya has worked or interned at the Logische Phantasie Lab, UN Women and the European Roma Rights Centre, and is a member of the Younger Generation Leaders Network on Euro-Atlantic Security (YGLN) and the Emerging Voices. Network of the British American Security Information Council.
She has authored and co-authored several policy briefs and has collaborated on projects with Princeton University’s Program on Global Science and Security. Some of his writings and paintings can be found in Inkstick Media, Antonym Magazine, American Oxonian, and Oxford Review of Books. .
Akshay Swaminathan: Scholarship awarded to a PhD in biomedical data science at Stanford University
Akshay Swaminathan was born in Wood-Ridge, New Jersey, to Indian immigrants from Tamil Nadu, India. His paternal grandparents immigrated to Westchester, New York in 1969, where they were one of the only Indian families in the area.
They coped with this unfamiliar environment while maintaining love and attachment to their cultural roots, an attachment that Akshay inherited as a child while learning Carnatic music. His reports on learning Indian music and language have taught him the importance of overcoming generational, linguistic, and social barriers. to bond with others.
In high school, after finding an online network of polyglots, Akshay began reading foreign languages and eventually discovered training techniques that helped him learn more than ten languages.
At Harvard College, she discovered the pleasure of languages to connect with and serve others from other backgrounds. He served as the Executive Director of Refresh Bolivia, a global fitness nonprofit, where he and his teammates built a number one physical care clinic serving 10,000 Indigenous Citizens in Cochabamba.
He also directed Harvard Chinatown ESL, a program that introduced flexible English categories to adult Chinese immigrants, and published five textbooks for teaching English to Chinese speakers. He is the founder of Start Speaking, a platform for language learners to expand their conversational skills and has created resources for languages ranging from Quechua to Medical Chinese.
As a knowledge scientist, Akshay creates knowledge-based teams for patients, clinicians, and policymakers, with real-world implementation. He has more than 40 publications applying quantitative strategies to fitness disorders and is co-author of the e-book Winning with Data Science, published through Columbia University Press.
At Flatiron Health, Akshay developed strategies to analyze observational clinical knowledge for FDA decision-making. As head of knowledge science at Cerebral, a virtual intellectual fitness company, he and his team implemented a suicide detection formula that served more than 500,000 patients worldwide. United States.
Akshay is a physician candidate and Knight-Hennessy Fellow at Stanford University and is currently pursuing a PhD in biomedical data science. Under the mentorship of Nigam Shah, he is devising approaches to use synthetic intelligence safely and effectively to deliver healthcare.
Akshay envisions a doctor who combines knowledge, science, and medicine adapting to fitness systems in low-resource areas.
Keerthana Hogirala: Scholarship awarded to an MBA/MPP at the University of Chicago
Keerthana Hogirala was born in Tirupati, India and immigrated to the United States with her parents and younger brother when she was six years old. From the beginning, his parents worked long hours running multiple tasks to maintain the task and the money needed to make it bigger. immigration and keep family members in their new home. To relieve some of the tension they felt through her parents, Keerthana took responsibility for her family’s well-being and her education, as well as that of her brother from an early age.
After more than a decade of persistent effort, uncertainty and anxiety, his family was finally granted citizenship. This experience taught Keerthana to take nothing for granted, to prepare for the unknown, and to do anything meaningful. with the opportunities his parents gave him.
This latter motivator led Keerthana to study neuroscience at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she focused on child development, trauma-informed care, and social well-being.
She also led Volunteer Illini Projects, one of the largest student-led and student-staffed volunteer organizations, and helped expand local nonprofits serving underserved populations. Over time, during her fieldwork for her graduation thesis, she found that she felt much more full of life. and more hopeful of running directly with young people than pursuing a college education.
After graduation, Keerthana became a special education instructor in the early years of training at a Title 1 school in the District of Columbia Public Schools (DC Public Schools). On a daily basis, it faced structural problems that prevented its vulnerable students from receiving compulsory tuition. Comprehensive support.
To expand systems-level responses for students, it joined the D. C. Public Schools Central Administration. Within central administration, Keerthana is one of the key leaders managing D. C. schools’ COVID-19 pandemic response, general operations. and the eventual reopening of schools across the city.
To meet the city’s pressing desires in an unprecedented crisis, he brought cutting-edge new approaches to system-wide operations, strategy, design, and generation. This led her to become chief of staff to the chief technology officer, where she oversaw the generation of the school system. strategy, knowledge governance and the multi-year virtual transformation initiative.
Drawing on her experiences, Keerthana is pursuing a dual MBA and MPP degree at the University of Chicago to explore how cross-industry generation and collaboration can be leveraged to create efficient, embedded systems of critical services.
Their hope is to address critical public desires and promote social development, especially for underserved populations. In recognition of her commitment to public service and leadership, Keerthana was one of three full-time scholars selected through the Booth School of Business for a Neubauer. Civic Scholar and received a full scholarship to pursue his MBA.
At the Harris School of Public Policy, she is a Harris Merit Scholar and the sole recipient of the Knas Family Scholarship, which awarded her a 90% scholarship to continue her studies as a Member of Parliament.
Outside of school, she is a member of the Leadership Now Project, an advisor to the U. S. Digital Response, a member of the Chicago Council of New Leaders and a longtime supporter of progressive political and advocacy campaigns.
Malavika Kannan: Scholarship awarded to an MFA in Fiction
Malavika Kannan was born in Johnstown, Pennsylvania and grew up in Central Florida, in a tight-knit network of Indian immigrant families. Her parents emigrated from South India in the 1990s, and Malavika’s earliest memories come from normal visits to the public library with her. parents, ridiculous plays with his sister, and stories from Indian mythology told through his grandparents. She’s known for a long time that she needs to be a writer.
Like many other young people in Florida, Malavika grew up aware of the effects of gun violence, police violence, and racism in her community. Her first conscious, proudly American experience came at age 16, when she and her best schoolmates organized a school-wide strike against gun violence. As a teenager, Malavika organized safer and more just communities with organizations such as March For Our Lives, Women’s March, and Giffords.
Malavika’s formative reports as an organizer influence her writing, an art form that she considers inherently political, imaginative, and community-oriented. Malavika writes about identity, culture, and politics for The Washington Post, Teen Vogue, Refinery29, and The San Francisco Chronicle. , amassing an online network of approximately 50,000 people.
During the pandemic, Malavika began writing a young adult novel about a queer Native American woman growing up, struggling with violence, and finding love in Florida. This novel became All the Yellow Suns, a coming-of-age story published through Little
Now a senior at Stanford University, Malavika immersed herself in art writing, South Asian studies, and women’s literature. She will graduate with a bachelor’s degree in Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies and will present two honors theses: a Dalit women’s studies thesis. Environmental writing and a literary novel about pandemic scholars.
Malavika will pursue a master’s degree in fiction to hone her literary skills and prepare for a career as a novelist and literature teacher. She is grateful for all the opportunities she has been given and hopes to continue writing queer brown women in the narrative and make it a proud circle of relatives.
Shubhayu Bhattacharyay: Scholarship awarded to pursue a Doctor of Medicine at Harvard University
Shubhayu Bhattacharyay was born in Kolkata, India and spent his early formative years in Thailand and Vietnam before settling in the South Bay of Los Angeles. Through long-distance phone calls and in bed from the shared circle of relatives, Shubhayu learned his local Bengali language and culture. of his grandparents.
Appreciating his heritage has helped Shubhayu appreciate the cultural diversity of his predominantly immigrant community and understand the demanding healthcare situations shared by his communities in India and Los Angeles.
At Johns Hopkins University, Shubhayu earned a dual major in Biomedical Engineering and Applied Mathematics and Statistics with a minor in Spanish. He supported through the Milken Scholars program and earned all departmental honors and Tau Beta Pi. While in college, Shubhayu founded Auditus Technologies, a company that invents individualizable hearing aids available to adults with dementia.
Shubhayu began considering a medical career during the summer after his freshman year of college, when he met traumatic brain injury (TBI) survivors who were participating in a study on the brain-computer interface.
Their stories motivated Shubhayu to think about how his interest in computational neuroscience could contribute to a higher quality of life after traumatic brain injury. With mentorship from Professor Robert Stevens of Johns Hopkins, Shubhayu invented and published the effects of the first bedside computer formula for detecting and classifying the motor function of TBI patients in the intensive care unit.
In 2020, Shubhayu was awarded a Gates Cambridge Fellowship to pursue a PhD in clinical neuroscience at the University of Cambridge under the supervision of Professors Ari Ercole and David Menon.
For his thesis, Shubhayu developed AI strategies that improve the detail of data provided for prognostic advice and recommend separately optimized treatment plans for TBI management in intensive care. His paintings have led to publications in leading online fitness and neurotrauma magazines, and open access software packages. and invited lectures at foreign conferences.
During his postgraduate studies, Shubhayu volunteered at Headway Cambridge and Peterborough, a rehabilitation centre run by a charity for acquired brain injury survivors, where he helped launch an evidence-based programme to build mental resilience during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Shubhayu is currently a medical student at Harvard Medical School and aspires to become a physician-engineer in neurocritical or neurosurgical care. At Harvard, he studies the resources of bias in medical AI to protect patient protection and equity in the clinical deployment of problem-solving aid systems. TBI care. Shubhayu’s project aims at the accuracy and global accessibility of TBI care through Big Data.
The American Bazaar is published by American Bazaar, Inc. , in Germantown, MD.